When it comes to MMOs that are outside the usual heroic fantasy mold, things don't always seem to click as well as you'd like to think. While The Secret World and Star Wars: The Old Republic are holding their own, they're still pretty small change compared to fantasy worlds like World of WarCraft and Guild Wars 2. Carbine Studios looks to break the mold on that with WildStar, and they might have the formula.
Characters in WildStar choose from two factions, the Dominion and the Exiles, each with four different races, six classes, and four “Paths” which give your character extra side quests and activities within the game world. As one might expect, certain combinations of race and class are unavailable, but Paths are available to anybody. Once you pick one, though, you're on it for good. The character designs have a style reminiscent of Saturday morning cartoons back in the '80s and there are a good number of customization options available.
As for the geography, there's a wide variety of environments which the player can explore fairly thoroughly. If anything, the layout of the maps encourages exploration, trying to find paths to different areas and hard-to-reach treasures. Not only is the variety wide, but the scope of each area is vast, closer to the scale found in Guild Wars 2 than WoW.
When it comes to combat, there are plenty of powers available. You're limited to a certain number of slots, again similar to Guild Wars 2, which can be changed out after combat and can be arranged into specific power sets to help quickly change roles depending on your party.
One of the nice things about combat in WildStar is the use of indicators to show the area of affect for your powers. Now you don't have to guess whether the target will actually get hit or not. You just line it up and let it rip.
Of course, the same courtesy applies to your enemies as well.
Lucky for you, you have active dodges, although they're limited in number. Some areas are densely packed enough that you might draw aggro from other mobs if you dodge in the wrong direction so it pays to have a degree of situational awareness.
Certain abilities require stacks of class specific resources to be used. Some classes have these resources replenish naturally over time while others require the player to build up stacks before unleashing stronger abilities. As always, the admonishment of “learn to play your class” holds true.
Music and sound in the game are very well done. Musical themes tend towards twanging guitars and flute for the Exiles, while brassy marches and dissonant synth pieces are found with the Dominion. Additionally, each geographic area has its own sorts of themes, so there's not any shortage of good music to listen to while you're grinding.
Sound effects are possibly the one weak spot in the game. While the quality of the effects themselves are really good, some of them get so utterly repetitive you want to cry, particularly the weapon sounds. You might get some ultra-rare weapon drop which shatters enemies and lays waste to all that it comes into contact with and it will sound exactly the same as the crappy starter weapon that you began with way back when.
To some extent, I can understand the idea of making it so that players will always be able to discern what another player's class is from an audio perspective, but there's no reason why customized weapon sounds wouldn't work.
Whatever weakness the sound effects might have, though, is more than offset by the top notch voice acting cast assembled. It reads like the Who's Who of voice acting: Fred Tatasciore, Laura Bailey, Travis Willingham, Tara Strong, Beau Billingslea, Cree Summer, Yuri Lowenthal, and a few dozen more. The only thing needed to complete the 80s cartoon vibe of the visuals would have been hiring Peter Cullen and BJ Ward. Whether they're playing disposable mobs or iconic characters within the game's setting, every actor brings their A-game to their parts.
Crafting is a different affair from most any system one can immediately recall. For one thing, it costs players their hard earned coin to craft an item, not just materials. So, if you've just bought new powers or kitted yourself out with some sweet new faction gear, you might not be doing much to advance your crafting skills just yet. A large number of recipes/schematics encountered so far have “alternative” outputs. These can be created by adding item modifiers to the base plan to try and hit target icons in a minigame. Each of those modifiers adds to the cost of the item, and you only have three of them. Moreover, if you cancel the crafting because you missed the target, you lose the mats and the cash spent, so grinding your crafting is not necessarily going to be an easy sort of task. Discovering these alternative creations uses the same process, but you're having to hit a target masked by a shaded area in the crafting target screen, so finding new alternatives is occasionally a very expensive proposition in terms of cash and mats. While the idea is intriguing, the snag in the process is that you can easily forget what modifiers make what items. It would have perhaps been a better idea to simply break the alternatives out as separate recipes once they've been discovered and factor in the cost of the modifiers than having to memorize a laundry list of modifiers.
If crafting is painful, harvesting mats is almost ridiculously easy. Some materials like plant seeds can be obtained by shooting the appropriate plants and gathering the loot drops. Others require specific tools to perform the actual harvesting, but it only takes a few extra seconds before you can gather the loot. Plus, all crafting materials (with a few exceptions) go into a “Tradeskill” bag which doesn't require you to expand your inventory in order to keep gathering stuff up. The only downside is that each “making” skill usually requires goods produced by other harvesting skills, so it's possible one or more of your toons will be doing nothing but mining or cutting down trees.
- Axel Cushing
The Good:
- Excellent voice cast
- Great art style
- Very helpful combat systems
The Bad:
- Crafting systems are maybe a little too deep
- Inconsistent narrative tone
Editor's Note: From Carbine's website in regard to subscription fees -
C.R.E.D.D. is an in-game account item that, when consumed, extends an account’s subscription by 30 days. C.R.E.D.D. can be bought from other players in-game via the C.R.E.D.D. Exchange for earned in-game gold, or you can purchase C.R.E.D.D. online from the WildStar Shop. If you go for C.R.E.D.D. you can use your first month of gameplay to earn gold while playing WildStar.
Next month, instead of paying the monthly subscription fee, you can use gold earned in-game to purchase C.R.E.D.D. from other players through our in-game C.R.E.D.D. Exchange. You can then redeem your C.R.E.D.D. for another month of WildStar game time. You can continue this cycle over and over again, enabling you to "play to pay" for WildStar
